His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on grounded and embodied semantics, human-like language generation and Q&A/dialogue, and interpretable and generalizable deep learning. He is a recipient of the DARPA Director's Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Google Focused Research Award, Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, ARO Young Investigator Award (YIP), DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), IJCAI Early CAREER Spotlight, and several outstanding paper awards at ACL, CVPR, EACL, COLING, and CoNLL. His service includes ACL Executive Committee, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, Program Co-Chair for CoNLL 2019, Senior Area Chair for several conferences, ACL Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair, and Associate/Action Editor for TACL, Computational Linguistics (CL), IEEE/ACM TASLP, and CSL journals.